Centuries of Judaica From Life and Rites in Muslim Lands

A Jewish neighborhood in Fez, Morocco (year unknown). Exhibitions at the Center for Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage focus on Sephardic artifacts from Arab countries.Credit
Diarna Geo-Museum

Artifacts from Sephardic Jews who fled Muslim countries, typically with few possessions in hand, are re-emerging and being reunited in virtual and tangible forms.

Two exhibitions now in Manhattan focus on ritual and household objects from Jews in the Persian Gulf. “Light and Shadows: The Story of Iranian Jews,” through April 27 at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History (with much material borrowed from Israeli collections), shows Arabic, Persian and Zoroastrian motifs and inscriptions blended on silver amulets and Torah finials. At the Museum of Jewish Heritage, “Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage” explains how American forces rescued a vanished Sephardic community’s paperwork in 2003 from a flooded basement at Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad intelligence headquarters.

Hussein had confiscated Jewish archives, with papers ranging from 16th-century prayer texts to 1960s school report cards. American conservators froze the sheets, to prevent further deterioration, and then defrosted, cleaned and patched them. Some of the religious pages, however, were deemed beyond repair; a few months ago, they were given a formal burial, according to Jewish tradition, at a Jewish cemetery on Long Island.

A handful of Jews still live in Iraq. (It is not yet clear whether the American government will return the material there.) More of their memorabilia in diaspora is headed into American institutional collections.

In March, the University of Pennsylvania’s library spent about $7,200 at the Manhattan auction house Kestenbaum & Company for a 1906 marriage contract printed in Baghdad. Edged in purple and red lotuses, it was used at a wedding in Singapore of a couple named Aaron and Mozlei Zion. The library has also received, as a gift from descendants of Iraqi rabbis, an 1820s miniature Torah scroll that was made in Baghdad and later used in Calcutta.

Wherever Jewish traders from Baghdad traveled, they ordered ceremonial documents from printers in Iraq. The émigrés “still went back to the mother country to get what they needed,” Daniel Kestenbaum, the auction house owner, said in an interview.

Arthur Kiron, the University of Pennsylvania library’s Judaica curator, said that Sephardic global wanderings were “complex and intellectually compelling.” Despite periods of exile and persecution in Muslim lands and persistent prejudice, he added, “it’s not just a trail of tears.”

Last year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, received a major Judaica collection including Hanukkah lamps from Morocco in silver, soapstone and brass. The Manhattan real estate magnate Joseph J. Sitt is developing plans for a Sephardic heritage museum focused on Syrian Jews. A Moroccan Sephardic synagogue on East 75th Street in Manhattan is expanding its library documenting 2,500 years of Jewish history in Morocco and planning to add a gallery for ritual pieces and family mementos.

Max N. Berry, a Judaica collector in Washington, is also developing plans for museum shows. His adviser, the Manhattan dealer Avi Girshengorn, has inventory (at prices from about $750 into the five figures) with multicultural mixtures of Ottoman crescents and Arabic inscriptions. In poorer parts of North Africa, Mr. Girshengorn said in an interview, “they didn’t have foundries to cast or chase metal, so every piece is unique.”

Raphael Benchimol, the head rabbi of the Manhattan congregation, said that he was inspired by the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca, the only comprehensive Jewish museum in the Arab world. It has filled a 1940s former Jewish orphanage with synagogue woodwork, brides’ colorful dresses, armchairs used in circumcision ceremonies and an entire Jewish silversmith’s booth from the medieval core of Fez.

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A synagogue sanctuary in Tangier, Morocco. Cemeteries are also being documented.Credit
Joshua Shamsi/Diarna Geo-Museum

The Casablanca museum is working with scholars on a digital database of Moroccan Jewish documents, including legal textbooks and poems. (A virtual reassembly of paperwork from Cairo’s Jews is in progress as well.) It is also collaborating with Mimouna, a Moroccan foundation that organizes Jewish cultural festivals.

Beginning in May, Mimouna events around Morocco will include an interactive exhibition about the country’s Jewish sites, created with Diarna, a research group in Boston that is building an online “geo-museum” for remnants of Jewish life in Arab lands.

“Everywhere in Morocco is Jewish memory,” Elmehdi Boudra, Mimouna’s president, said in an interview. A few thousand Jews remain in Morocco, mostly in urban areas. Diarna has documented the country’s lavish and rustic synagogues and cemeteries with raised stone tombs, as well as ruined Nazi camps at the Algerian border.

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Diarna teams have visited a dozen other countries, filming neighborhoods, digitizing old photos that turn up and interviewing inhabitants. The researchers studied some buildings just before they were demolished or suffered war damage, including a Jewish hospital in Tangiers and a synagogue in Damascus.

New and forthcoming books also point out faded evidence of Sephardic communities. “Sacred Precincts: Non-Muslim Sacred Sites in the Islamic World,” a volume due this year from the Dutch publisher Brill, contains an essay by the historian Mohammad Gharipour, the book’s editor, on Iranian synagogues with Persian coffered domes and scrollwork tile. “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria,” by the historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein (University of Chicago Press), describes forgotten Jewish family trees filed in Algerian municipal archives and a desert town’s synagogue “piled with garbage, newspapers and decomposing food.”

One major collection of Sephardic artifacts, however, was dispersed last year. At Sotheby’s in New York, the financier Michael H. Steinhardt sold Torah finials, women’s headdresses and Hanukkah lamps with dangling bells and silhouettes of birds and onion domes.

On an 1850s Moroccan marriage contract (which brought $9,375), painted borders resemble the region’s typical lobed archways. A silver and brass Hanukkah lamp with griffin motifs ($4,375) was made in Poland and then customized in Syria with Arabic inscriptions. Moriah Galleries, a Judaica specialty store in Manhattan, sold the piece to Mr. Steinhardt in the 1990s and bought it back at Sotheby’s. (The new price is $12,000.)

“It’s a unique combination of two cultures, two techniques and a splendid result,” Michael Ehrenthal, an owner of Moriah, said.

More documentation of Jewish presence in Arab countries keeps turning up. Duki Dror, an Israeli filmmaker whose parents fled Iraq in the 1950s, is working on a movie about his great-uncle Naji Ibrahim, an Iraqi military pilot. He had trained in Britain before World War II, fled Iraq during the war when a pro-Nazi regime took over and ended up flying British bombers over Germany.

Mr. Dror has pored through Ibrahim’s recently rediscovered 1930s photos of fellow pilots. “It’s a huge story,” Mr. Dror said, to be told against the backdrop of aging European empires trying to control the Persian Gulf and Jews being uprooted.

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2014, on Page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: Centuries of Judaica From Muslim Lands in Middle East. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe